This page provides editorial commentary on a historical initiative. WIGSAT (Women Inspiring Girls in STEM, Advancement & Training) is not affiliated with OWSD, the Elsevier Foundation, or any historical organization that operated under a name similar to ours. References to the GEKS initiative are for editorial historical purposes only.
Editorial commentary on a historical collaboration
During the late 2000s and early 2010s a small cluster of international organizations published several reports under the heading "Gender Equality in Knowledge Societies," commonly shortened to GEKS. The reports are sometimes cited in present-day policy literature on women in research workforces, but the partnership behind them is not always well understood. This page provides a brief editorial history for readers who encounter a GEKS citation and want context. The original documents themselves are preserved at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and any direct quotation or formal citation should go through that primary source rather than this commentary.
The first participant was the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World, generally known by the acronym OWSD. Established in 1987 and hosted at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, OWSD has long offered fellowships, research grants, and a member network for women scientists in low- and middle-income countries. Its inclusion in the GEKS partnership reflected the initiative's intent to ground its findings in conditions outside the high-income world.
The second participant was a non-governmental organization that operated wigsat.org between 1998 and the mid-2010s, working on gender and international science-and-technology policy. That organization is no longer active. The present WIGSAT directory — Women Inspiring Girls in STEM, Advancement & Training — is a separate later use of the same domain and has no organizational, legal, or operational continuity with the earlier NGO. This page references the earlier organization only for the limited historical purpose of describing the GEKS partnership.
The third participant was the Elsevier Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the academic publishing company Elsevier. The Foundation's interest reflected wider attention within the publishing industry during this period to the gender composition of authorship, peer review, and editorial board membership in scientific journals.
The collaboration's principal output was a benchmarking framework, often referred to as the GEKS Scorecard, intended to compare countries on women's participation across a range of knowledge-society indicators — from school-level science enrollment through doctoral training to research-workforce composition and senior science-policy roles. The framework was accompanied by national assessments applying it to several countries, including India, the Republic of Korea, and South Africa, as well as a shorter "key findings" document aimed at non-specialist policy audiences.
The partnership's design — one development-focused membership body, one policy-focused NGO, and one industry-funded foundation — was discussed at the time as a deliberately unusual coalition. Readers interested in multi-stakeholder coalitions in research-policy advocacy may find the partnership's structure a useful historical case, with the caveat that organizational missions and circumstances have since changed.